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3/29/2015

Cinemalinks: Weekly Reads

Lol, Furious 7 at the Oscars?

It’s been a busy two weeks since I
last posted a link round-up, but there’s lots to review. The big topic in
movieland is the impending decision from the Academy as it decides the fate of
the Best Picture category. Will they revert back to five nominees? If so, does
this mean we can finally agree that The
Reader got in over The Dark Knight on
merit??? Either way, this flexible 5-10 thing needs to go. A firm five or a firm ten, please!

Let’s start with a case for ten
from one of the supporters of a wider, more inclusive field. Do we need a
bigger number to get the fuller picture?

Like it or not, the awards race
is bigger than the Oscars now. They are the final word on the season. On the
one hand, they will blame the drop in ratings or lack of interest in the Oscars
on awards season fatigue – it is exactly the opposite of that. The public is
watching the Academy and waiting for a dramatic finish.

On the other hand, do the changes
in the film industry even warrant ten possible Best Picture nominees? I think
Anne Thompson makes a good point here that the blockbusters have changed in
recent years—perhaps the overall decline in the quality of major studio fare is
a fairer reason to account for the absence of films like The Dark Knight (or The
Avengers, etc) rather than voter snobbery.

The studios have stopped making,
for the most part, the movies that used to be in Oscar contention. Prestige
dramas are now the purview of specialty distributors. Hollywood studio big
budget A-list movies are what used to be B-list fare. Which is why so many comic
book blockbusters are relegated to the tech categories that celebrate the best
sets, costumes and spectacle cinematography. The closest this year's Oscar race
came to an old-fashioned Hollywood Oscar movie was Wes Anderson's elegantly
designed European valentine, "The Grand Budapest Hotel," which won
four Oscars.

Any Oscar predictions being
tossed around this early in the year need to be taken with a grain of salt (a
big one), and the funniest and looniest forescast so far is Vin Diesel’s own
bold claim that Furious 7 is the film
to beat. That’s all fine if the Oscars want a big blockbuster to draw in the
ratings, but do voters need to have seen the other Fast and the Furii films to appreciate Furious 7?

“Universal is going to have the
biggest movie in history with this movie,” Diesel said in a lengthy interview
with Variety
for this week’s cover story. “It will probably win best picture at the Oscars,
unless the Oscars don’t want to be relevant ever.”

... Maybe Diesel is on to
something, after all. Or maybe not: when told about the prediction, a Universal
executive chuckled and then asked to go off the record.

The first years of a fixed ten
Best Picture nominees seemed to hold much promise for animation as Up and Toy Story 3 received back-to-back nominations. Animation’s on the
rise, but is one of it’s power players on the decline? This look at Dreamworks,
whose How to Train Your Dragon 2 was
last year’s best animated film, is an insightful look at the studio machinery
that doesn’t quite seem to work anymore.

Having perfected a factory for
producing animated features that anyone could follow, DreamWorks was as
responsible as any studio for the glut of animation that hit in 2009 and has
continued largely unabated ever since. By making its products too ubiquitous,
the studio was making them routine and increasingly easy to ignore.

I really need to find a way to make at least six days of the week run for twenty-five hours so I ca make time to finally watch The Jinx. I'm fascinated by the response to it--and by the response to the response. Before looking to the fascination behind The Jinx, though, it might be worth visiting one of the landmarks of crime docs, The Thin Blue Line.

It’s all too easy to imagine ourselves caught in those wheels — and
thus, it’s easy to see a filmmaker like Morris as the kind of advocate
we’d want on our side. Having supported himself for three years as a
private investigator, The Thin Blue Line was an opportunity for
him to merge his two skills, digging deep into the tiny details of the
decade-old case and training his camera on those who had something to
gain from Adams’ conviction. His hands-off style — which amounts to
giving his interviewees enough rope to hang themselves — results in a
clear picture of what really happened in Dallas, and an indirect
confession from the man who, by that point at the end of the film,
Morris has made a very strong case against.

Cannes is on the horizon! What
films are you most excited to hear about from coverage on the Croisette?The team at The Playlist breaks down a
list of possible/hopeful contenders including Todd Hayne’s Carol, Luca Guadagnino’s A
Bigger Splash and the Marion Cotillard/Michael Fassbender Macbeth. I’m hoping to see another
strong year for Canadian films, although last year’s coup of Mommy, Maps to the Stars, Tu dors
Nicole, and (sort of) The Captive
isn’t to be expected.

Normally, we’d have learned at
least what the opening film of the festival by this this time would be, but the
line-up remains very much under wraps at the
moment. Yet there are plenty of likelies and strong potentials, and so
with our eyes on the Croisette, we’ve rounded up twenty of the films that we
most hope will be screening at Cannes when the festival kicks off on May 13th.
Take a look below, let us know what you’d like to see at the the festival in
the comments, and keep your eyes peeled for an official announcement for the
lineup in the coming weeks.

One of the
Canadian films I’m most looking forward to is Rafael Ouellet’s Gurov and Anna. The director’s first
film in English seems to be earning some admiration in Montreal. It’s pitched
as a campus infidelity drama, but this collaboration between Ouellet and writer
Celeste Parr sounds like a wonderful play on our relationship with art, love,
and life.

But this beautifully shot mostly
Mile End-set drama is so much more than that[ an infidelity drama]. It’s also a
meditation on literature, constructing narratives and losing oneself in those
constructed narratives. Ah yes — it’s the product of a former McGill literature
and cultural studies student! In fact, the first draft of Gurov & Anna was
Parr’s master’s thesis at McGill. But fear not: Parr and Ouellet have created a
riveting, emotionally charged work far removed from its academic beginnings.

Mommy’s Suzanne Clément has another
powerhouse performance on the circuit with Sitting
on the Edge of Marlene. The actress talks with Scene Creek about delving in to such a mysterious character and
enjoying the rare pleasure of working with a female director of her own age.

[On her character Marlene]: The
more I got into her the more I understood her. You have to be in a state of
Marlene to do Marlene. It took a while. What was most interesting was the
unbalance of Marlene. The fact of working with Ana who is a woman of my age
also was attractive. Some of our preoccupations or desires in life were
similar. We related to each other. The force and strength that she has. It’s
what is in Marlene, this strength and vulnerability

Dork Shelf talks with Matt Sadowsk about
his film Pretend We’re Kissing, which
recently sold out at the Canadian Film Festival in Toronto and screens as part
of the Canadian Indie Film Series in select Landmark theatres this Wednesday.
The film sounds like a lot of fun, especially for those of us who’ve grown up
with a love/hate relationship for the way romantic comedies give us unrealistic
expectations about life. (It’s a “non rom-com,” too!)

[on the film as a
response to rom-com]: Originally Pretty in Pink wasn’t supposed to end well, she wasn’t supposed to
get together with Andrew McCarthy at the end. Then they tested it and everyone
was really upset that she didn’t hook up with him after all that, so they
reshot. I would have been satisfied with that, because sometimes it is about
all that build up, then it’s like ‘alright, I’ve learned my lesson’. I don’t
think anyone thinks those characters end up marrying each other, so why do they
have to get together in the end? I wanted to write a film about spending that
one magical day with someone, can you hold on to that? Should you hold on to
that?

Crowdfunding Shout-out:

I don’t usually get excited by
crowdfunding projects anymore, but the Canadian horror film The Void sounds really interesting and
is doing gnagbusters. They’re seeking help to make some monsters the good
old-fashioned way, which isn’t easy to do for independent filmmakers. As they
say, “Mo’ money, mo’ monsters!” (Visit their campaign here.)

Video of the Week:

Christopher Plummer leaves his
prints outside the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood to mark the 50th
anniversary of The Sound of Music.
Congrats to Canada’s finest actor!